The brain's fundamental secret will be laid open one day

Its rousing climax left behind in chapter four, Saturday's dénouement forces us to reflect on the limitations of both the sciences and the humanities. Operating on Baxter, Perowne thinks, "Just like the digital codes of replicating life held within DNA, the brain's fundamental secret will be laid open one day. But even when it has, the wonder will remain, that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre. Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious? . . . He knows it will come, the secret will be revealed--over decades, as long as the scientists and the institutions remain in place, the explanations will refine themselves into an irrefutable truth about consciousness" (262-63).

Do you agree with Henry's faith in science? In terms of the problems presented in Saturday, what can science solve, and what can it not? Can the humanities step in where science is limited? You must give at least two examples from your reading.

Your post of no less than 400 words is due by 11:59PM, Thursday, 21 February.

Extra credit post

So you know those links to the right that offer wonderfully insightful information on the texts we're examining? Well, I'm inviting your wonderfully insightful comments on a couple of them for extra credit. For a one hundred point quiz grade, either read "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero," or listen to the KCRW interview with McEwan and post a 200 word response. In your response, please focus on McEwan's description of the media coverage following 9/11, paying particular attention to the way in which he describes and imagines the effect mass images had on individual psyches. Can you relate anything McEwan says to Perowne's experiences in Saturday? To receive extra creidt, post your response by 11:59PM Sunday, 17 February.

Thought Experiment

Respond to the following questions in a post of no less than 300 words. Your post is due by 11:59PM, Sunday, 10 February.


Why is "thought experiment" of Schrödinger's cat (btm. 17- 18) so fitting an end to the first section of the novel? Why does Henry reject it as a thought experiment? How does the image of the cat in the box address the idea of disasters that occur outside the range of our own consciousness? In other words, why after hearing on the radio that the plane has crashed, does Henry think "Schrödinger's dead cat is alive after all" (36).

I hang on to hope in a tide of fear

from his website...

Ian McEwan was born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, England. He studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970. While completing his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia, he took a creative writing course taught by the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson.

McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday.

DPR - Donovan Public Radio

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